Redecorating

As you can see I redecorated again. I wanted something a little lighter this time.

For anyone who might be thinking of redecorating I found a site called Colourlovers that has thousands of backgrounds, most of which as far as I could see, free to use with attribution to the creators. The background I used is called Snow-frozen, created by manasijoshi and sunmeadow.

Snow-frozen is a variation on a pattern. At Colourlovers you can make your own background using pattern templates that you can color in yourself. Another great thing is that if you choose a pre-made pattern the colors used are listed in the pattern, making it easy to match the colors in the Blogger template. Without this feature, this whole thing would be a hot mess. I'm not exactly color blind, but if left to my own devices I would come up with a scheme that would make your eyes bleed.

There are still a few tweaks to be made, I'm kind of iffy on the fonts I chose, but otherwise I'm happy with it.

Welcome back to Achievements/Goals. I missed several postings, because my laptop crapped out on me. I had been making it work for almost a year after my 90 pound dog jumped on it, breaking a hinge, and cracking the bevel around the screen; but every time I moved the stupid thing the the lid moved a little, eventually causing chunks of plastic to break off and about a third of the screen to go black. When faced with the decision of whether to repair it or replace it, I went the repair route which took three weeks.

Hey, did you know that Toshiba no longer makes computers? Well, I didn't until I went to get mine fixed. Apparently, replacement parts have to be hand delivered from Japan, because that's how long it felt like I was sans laptop.

Hey, do you know how much it costs to replace basically the entire lid of a Toshiba laptop? Neither did I until I had to choke back the tears as I handed my credit card to the Geek Squad guy.

Good Evening. I missed some time, yes. I got busy with life, but I hope to be back on track. Without further ado, here's what has happened over the past couple of weeks:

Achievements I've been slowly working my way through Camp NaNoWriMo this month. I fell of the wagon pretty hard after four days, but with my low word count goal, it has been fairly easy to make up the lost time. I think I'll be able to finish within goal.I did a reading at my writing group two weeks ago. I got positive comments all around, which surprised me, because I was pretty sure that the best thing I could bring to the table was mediocre. I'm still not ready to accept positive feedback. That's the weirdest thing with me. I will absolutely accept criticism without fail, but give me a compliment, and I'm sure you're "just being nice."GoalsPretty much the same as they have been. I'm trying to just get myself on a baseline of competence before trying anything new.Continue to …